My Vista Cherry
So I was bored this evening and decided I wanted to finally bother playing with Vista. So I went about setting up a Virtual Server and went to town installing the OS. The installer has to be PE based just from seeing the way it boots (just makes me think of all those Linux LiveCD Installers), and they have performed a miracle (at least for Windows) in the install process of allowing you to load drivers without needing a floppy! Hooray!
Beyond that, it’s interesting to see that the product key is the very first thing that must be input to begin the installation. I guess it is a good thing, I’d rather know the key is bad at the start, rather than having to wait 20+ minutes to find out that it’s a bad key. Initially had some issues with getting the Virtual HD formatted, but I might attribute that to all the work my machine is doing in the Disk I/O department at this moment, and not neccesarily Vista’s fault. The more I interact with this install process the more and more it just feels Linux like, not that it is a bad thing, but as always Microsoft is playing catch up.
A few clicks later and I get the “Windows will finish installing automatically” message and wander off to get a drink. And then take out the trash… and then make some dinner (scrambled eggs, cheddar cheese and salsa). And then I went out to the store to get some more to drink, and then came the Halo session. (Note, this is again most likely because all actions were taking places on a set of mirrored 160GB SATA drives, that contain both the VM Hard Drive, the CD image, and the tunes playing on the system). Finally, after a couple games of CTF, we are ready for more input.
Created my user, and named the PC, selected the “Monkey User” setting, set the clock and I was ready to go! Hit the “Start” button and wait. No, I haven’t really gotten to play with it yet, just installed… maybe tomorrow, in the mean time though I got my cherry popped.